Tuesday, March 27, 2007

With Craig on their backs, editors ask reporters to change

With craigslist.org stifling their newspapers' classified sales, ASNE editors said they were beefing up their coverage on the Web, according to a survey run by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Of the nearly 100 editors who responded to the online poll, 46 percent said the free online classifieds site was the culprit behind drops in advertising revenues. Papers with a circulation of more than 100,000 were hardest hit.

Almost all of the editors reported having created multimedia packages online, and 87 percent were putting up online-only content. And staff numbers showed it. Of the editors, 86 percent were requiring reporters to learn how to manipulate video and sound, and 72 percent were hiring journalists solely to run their Web sites.

But it wasn't all about Craig: Editors sounded off on ethics in the survey, too. Read the story here.